Steve Courson, an offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 1977-85, was America's first professional athlete to fully disclose use of anabolic steroids for performance. Courson voluntarily told his story to Sports Illustrated almost 25 years ago as an active NFL player, detailing his juicing on 'roids from NCAA football into the league, then was blackballed from the game. Only a handful of elite athletes since Courson are comparable for open honesty in the issue; he spoke whole truth as he knew it, short of naming individuals.
By Matt Chaney
Posted November 24, 2009
For this writing I remember a fine friend in Steve Courson, who died in a tree-cutting accident on November 10, 2005, at age 50. As in sudden death, questions go unanswered for family and friends of Steve, particularly for his future lost. He was an extraordinary individual, vibrant and talented.
But no one has to wonder what Steve would say today about drugs in sport, the contemporary headlines of the issue he ruled.
Steve would let rip with the same talking points he'd built and honed by the final year of his life. After 20 years working the public debate over sport doping, he was expert like no other, with honesty and multi-experience keeping him at vortex of the volatile issue.
He began with simple anabolic-steroid use in major-college football, 1973, a teenager bent on winning, handed a doctor's prescription for Dianabol pills paid by the University of South Carolina. Steve graduated to studious abuse of steroids in pro football, injections within drug combinations, and he blew open the NFL's worst-kept secret in 1985: Unflinchingly, Steve discussed his steroid aid and football's systemic problem for a milestone story in Sports Illustrated, then the world's premier sporting publication.
Summarily tossed from the league, Steve was forced into retirement at age 31, but soon a devastating problem emerged: Doctors diagnosed him with dilated cardiomyopathy, damage to the heart's intricate muscle fibers. Steve suspected football lifestyle had spurred his grave illness, including steroid abuse, maniacal exertion, massive weight gain and alcohol abuse, and doctors placed him on a heart-transplant list for years.
As Steve fought through a slow recovery, he continued study of sport doping, meticulously documenting his argument for writings, speeches and media quotes. He saw a doping epidemic in American football, but pointed to a larger problem, pandemic in scope, the human embrace of drugs and more synthetics for enhancing physical performance and image. Twenty years ago, Steve charged the grandest hypocrisy lay in cultural affinity to blame mere individuals, a dangerous denial prone to manifest in ugly spectacles such as media and lawmaker floggings of the few athletes exposed for muscle doping.
He met teens and parents on a speaking circuit, informing them about PEDs, attesting to inherent risks for mind and body. All the while he existed barely above poverty level, beset by medical bills while losing $500,000 in bad investments. He was obese and in fragile state, bloated above 300 pounds due to medical procedures and inability to exercise stressfully.
Steve testified for Congress a first time in 1989, and he penned journal articles and book chapters on drug history in sport. In 1991 he produced False Glory [Longmeadow Press], his first-person account of brutal personal compromise for excelling in football--such as the athlete's submission to drug use. The book was critically acclaimed but didn't sell well, lacking tell-all sensationalism because Steve wouldn't name his drug cohorts in football, including superstars. He received just a few thousand dollars for years of book research and writing.
Steve regained health, year by year. Eventually doctors removed him from the transplant list, and they declared his condition completely reversed in 2004. With a clean bill of health, not to mention an incredibly cut body at 245 pounds, Steve proudly ended his modest disability compensation from the NFL and players union.
Meanwhile, Steve gained overdue recognition as a foremost expert on doping, while BALCO revelations led a torrent of scandalous news about athletes, actors, musicians, police officers and more public figures. Steve was a busy man in 2005, writing, speaking, granting interviews, and he testified on Capitol Hill for a final time.
Steve and I conversed frequently that year, mostly via telephone and daily in some stretches. Periodically, I interviewed him on-record for my book on muscle drugs in football, taping about 20 hours of discussion between us. I had much in common with Steve, as a former steroid user in college football [1982, Southeast Missouri State] who had also moved into study, writing and speaking openly on the problem.
This essay features Steve's perspective on doping topics at end of his life, culled from interviews with me. Most comments were previously unpublished, with a portion appearing in my recent book, Spiral of Denial.
Steve's views resonate today, relevant yet, and that is in part for his expertise, a credit to him. But their power lives too because nothing has reversed rampant doping in Steve's wake, and that is discredit to human nature.
Steve's on-record comments are juxtaposed with current doping events or scandal springing from the same maladies of his time. Topics include the following: invalid testing or useless anti-doping; undetectable substances like human growth hormone and low-dose testosterone; health and disability; obfuscation by officials in sport and anti-doping; hedged insider confessions or acknowledgments, and outright denial by athletes, media and fans; and future implosion for the football institution over player sizes, drugs, secrecy, medical costs and liability. Steve does empathize for the athlete's dilemma with PEDs, and his life demonstrates honesty can imperil more than a jock's personal sporting legend.
Timely comments even cover Mark McGwire, who's spent most this decade in seclusion, evading questions about his apparent doping in baseball. Steve's insider advice is still useful to McGwire, particularly for the disgraced slugger's pending news conference, certain to be a fiery reentry to public life as Cardinals hitting coach.
Truth and denial
In 2005 Steve Courson loved the comedy parade of lying athletes, their outrageous denials against allegations or queries regarding performance-enhancing substances. Steve's voice and laugh were deep, booming within a closed room, and he roared at baseball star Sammy Sosa's televised act before Congress, when the outgoing Dominican suddenly got quiet, halting at steroid questions under oath, nervously twiddling pages of his prop English primer.
Steve anticipated the Sosa reaction for typical juicing jocks caught red-handed, their mumbling and stammering in acknowledgments that were incomplete, dubious, nonsensical or downright silly. "When you look at all the people who have talked about this...," Steve said, "it's either they did it for an injury; they didn't realize it was a steroid; it was a [tainted] supplement; or they just did it once. I mean, they're at the point of looking ridiculous."
Steve would howl at today's clownish stars of the so-called full confessional, like Andy Pettitte, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz in baseball. Whining and crying about "making a mistake" with PEDs has gained popularity among athletes, especially those facing public pressure based on strong evidence of guilt. Jocks might only vaguely recall their doping, yet they reap public-relations return by deflating scandal.
But flimsy excuses, Steve would actually understand. He didn't condemn an active athlete for evasion or outright denial. Foremost, Steve contended the modern athlete turns to PEDs for merely competing in a drug-soaked environment.
Besides, openness was hazardous. In strictly pragmatic terms, Steve recommended the tainted athlete to decline comment, reveal nothing for career sake--or opt for that fake contrition by issuing cheesy excuse and apology. Steve used himself as example for honesty's consequences, his lost opportunity and finances over speaking out, which provoked football forces and their tentacle influence throughout society.
"I've gone through 20 years of bullshit, for speaking just the truth," he said a few months before his death. "And it's the truth that everyone knew. I'm still trying to figure out what happened. ... What about punishing teams for the discretions of their players? Because don't be foolish enough to believe their coaches don't know."
Image preservation for the lying or evasive athlete, Steve insisted, is motivated by security concern as much as ego or vanity. And within doping hysteria of 2000s America, the user athlete must worry about grand juries, criminal charges, and summons by politicians to testify. Just a few celebrity athletes caught doping feed the political processes for years.
"We realize that we live in a very image-conscious society," Steve said, "and nowhere in society is image more paramount than the world of sport. It's everything, for whatever reason, and nobody wants to compromise his image because of the stigma associated with steroid use."
Sport and society trash individual athletes who get caught as "part of the institutional strategy," Steve said. "Basically, the theory of 'a few bad apples' has been historically employed as sports propaganda. Therefore, when you consider all those factors, and then you combine 'em with the fact that, as of 1990, [steroids are] against the law, and the huge money involved, [denial] shouldn't surprise anybody."
However, Steve wouldn't have done differently in spring 1985, when SI investigator reporter Jill Lieber called him cold to ask whether he used steroids. He still would've answered, "Yes."
"I look at it this way...," he recalled. "Here I was, responding to my [football] environment, and I had the love-hate relationship with the drugs. I loved what they did for my training, but I hated compromising myself to a system where I felt I had to do it to retain my employment. ... I felt like I was in no-man's land. I just felt caught."
Steve wasn't subject to steroid punishment by the NFL; the league hadn't yet devised a policy. But he was bound by the game's code of silence, especially regarding widespread steroid use, and he was sick of it.
"The game is full of compromises," he said. "We compromise ourselves when we go to training camp. We'd rather be at the beach. We compromise when we have some jerk-off coach run you down in front of your teammates, humiliate you, because it's all part of making the team better, and you hold yourself back. You compromise when they stick the pain-killing needle into your knee when they need you to play. So the drugs are just another compromise."
"And, for me in 1985, I make all those compromises to play that game, and then I'm starting to have some health problems. ... I'm caught between these extremes here, and now I'm being asked to tell the truth about this. I'll compromise to a point, but I'm not going to lie about it. I was willing to compromise to do what I did, use the anabolic drugs."
"I would do all that for them [the NFL], but not lie for them."
User rationale
"To be honest, I liked playing football," Steve said in 2005. "Despite all the bullshit, I liked the game, you know. There's something about it; personally, it was the camaraderie, and the challenge of it. ... That continued to drive me to use the drugs, even though I got to the point where I didn't want to do 'em. I never really was that crazy about doing 'em, but then again... you invest all that time. You pour yourself totally into that game, it's real hard to step back."
"I think the big thing is--and what really gets obscured in all this, as far as athletes--athletes respond to their environment. If you look at my drug use throughout my career, I responded to my environment and my challenges. ... When you talk to most athletes, nobody likes [PEDs] but they feel they have to. And I think that is pretty universal."
Entering college football at age 17, Steve was already a wonder of genetics and work ethic, a great package of speed, power and size at 6-foot-2, 230 pounds, with 4.7-second time in the 40-yard dash. But he still needed drug augmentation, to succeed as a lineman in the big time.
A self-taught weightlifter in the 1960s and early 1970s, Steve bench-pressed 400 pounds as a senior in high school Then, at South Carolina, "I was just thrust into an environment where I was up against bigger, older guys, as a young kid," he said. "I knew I had to get bigger to do what I needed to do... . By the time I got to SC, strength-wise I'd pretty much hit the wall. I could've gotten bigger over time when I was in college, but I probably only would've gained 10 more pounds."
Encouraged toward steroids by a young assistant coach, Steve did only a six-week cycle of standard 5-milligram Dianabol tablets, therapeutic dosage, while training intensely and gorging on food. His genetically gifted body really responded to the drugs; his 40 time improved to 4.5, his bench press increased 50 pounds, and his weight expanded 30 to a size, mostly lean mass, that he maintained the rest of college football.
He upped the cycle of D-bol in the summer 1977, as a fifth-round draft pick of the Steelers, consuming one 15-mg tab daily for six weeks. "The second cycle, which I thought was huge at the time, I was so naive; that was less than a lot of women sprinters use today. So, in retrospect, I was near a 500-pound bench [press] with dosages of steroids that were actually minuscule."
"And when did my drug use take the next big leaps? When I was competing in the NFL strong-man competitions. Then, toward the end of my career, being regarded as one of the stronger players and competing in powerlifting."
By 1982 Steve was versed in steroid how-to information and had gathered anecdotal advice from juicers throughout football and weightlifting. He stacked multiple injectable and oral steroids in protocols considered state-of-art for the time, with his body weight reaching 285 pounds for the Steelers and his bench press around 575. With 405 on the bar, he cranked out 14 repetitions.
I asked Steve: "You never felt you were getting that far ahead of anybody? Your increasing use of steroids, to the point of abuse, was a response to your escalating environments?"
He laughed. "Well, part of it was response, but response in wanting to dominate. I was not there to bring up the trail."
"And who is content to be just an NFL special-teams guy, or third-teamer?" I suggested.
No one, Steve affirmed. "That's why unless they develop a testing technology that's foolproof, don't even think those drugs are going anywhere."
Steve didn't believe valid testing was possible without a fortune in funding for research and development. In 1989 he told Congress that doping's popular solution of the moment, random urinalysis, couldn't work effectively against techniques such as undetectable HGH, low-dose testosterone and designer steroids. During that period, Steve advocated open use of muscle drugs for elite athletes, under doctor supervision, but later abandoned the stance for concern about teenagers and modeling effect.
By 2005, Steve saw steroids as having saturated prep football, based on evidence that included invalid prevention, Internet accessibility, street dealers, and news reports. Moreover, he privately discussed the matter with teens, parents and coaches.
"Today, it starts in high school," he said. "[Teen players] learn about the drugs and how they work. Then they learn about beating detection in college football, and by the time any get to the NFL, they've learned how to be tested and they know the score."
Invalid testing, red herring of anti-doping
The stark fact of sport doping in continuum, now spanning generations of competitors such as fathers and sons in football, is that higher-aspiring athletes are confronted by the question of whether to employ anabolic steroids and more tissue-building hormones.
The athlete's drug dilemma typically begins in teen years, during high school, and always by college. Often a parent, relative or family friend is the persuasive informant and first source for muscle drugs, primarily steroids and costly HGH, according to news reports and information I've gathered for years from witnesses speaking off-record.
Yet America wants to believe that testing is effective against muscle doping in sport, particularly beloved football, our cultural religion of brute violence most conducive to drug use.
And America tries to frame the doping football player within a familiar, foolish stereotype: the isolated individual committed to cheating against the large majority dedicated to fair play--or the majority afraid to juice because testing is so effective, as testing promoters spin it.
This dangerous misconception is nurtured along by the officials of anti-doping, or sport organizers and testing contractors, since advent of steroid urinalysis at the 1976 Olympic Games. In football and all sport, steroid testing is a false hope that serves to absolve the system, blame players alone, and promote societal denial.
Meanwhile, muscle drugs roll on in football, a half-century since Dianabol's release, sweeping up new young players annually by the thousands, all levels. Guys keep getting bigger, deadlier for themselves as well as peers, and Steve wouldn't be surprised.
"The industry wants athletes to compete in a win-at-all-costs environment, which means they're gonna take drugs, yet pretend that they're not," he said in 2005.
Steve believed, as I do, that athletes would overwhelmingly support valid anti-doping--including monitoring that invaded privacy like year-round testing--as long as the vast majority could truly play clean and compete. That's impossible, unfortunately, for the near term and likely forever.
Conventional testing is unequivocally fault-ridden, subject to methods of evasion that include timing patented steroids around scanning periods, or employing undetectable substances year-round. Low-dose testosterone and growth hormone fly under conventional screening.
The so-called HGH blood test ballyhooed by Olympic and WADA officials is woefully inadequate, say experts, for problems such as high cost and a detection window of only hours following an athlete's use. More methodological cracks are unlikely to withstand a court challenge, particularly the test's lack of vetting by independent scientists. The prominent naysayers include two testing experts associated with WADA, Dr. Don Catlin and Dr. Peter Sonksen. Indeed, WADA hasn't announced one suspension for HGH despite years of blood sampling among thousands of Olympic athletes.
Unknown designer steroids are undoubtedly in circulation, with anti-doping authorities having identified about three in a quarter-century of the ghostly drugs. Catlin calculates 2,000 varieties are possible.
And the grandiose, expensive, struggling new initiative of blood-profiling, purported to identify drug use without reliance on chemical or bio signatures, offers no potential for helping the masses of amateur athletes. Even if such monitoring works effectively and can overcome legal challenges--critics say likely not on both counts--it is cost-prohibitive for deployment among a vast population such as American football, which includes about 1.5 million teen players scattered among 15,000 school districts.
Bottom line in football, anti-doping does not protect the player from drugged rivals, despite the 1994 California court ruling that testing must ensure athletes' safety and competitive fairness--the compelling mission that appellate judges determined supersedes individual right of privacy.
HGH in football
Growth hormone was used in NFL and NCAA football by 1985, players later reported, but Steve didn't encounter it until after retiring. "It was late '87, beginning of '88. I was training because I was thinking about pro wrestling. I was hittin' the gym and hittin' [steroids] again, and I would periodically run into some of the current players. Through interaction with them, I was clued in that some were using HGH. That was the first time they were facing non-punitive drug testing in the NFL."
"From what I understand, growth hormone works better when you supplement it with an androgen like testosterone." Steve noted the 2000s Carolina Panthers players who received HGH and steroids from Dr. James Shorrt, the South Carolina physician convicted of illegal dispensing and sentenced to a year in prison. During football season, Shortt provided some Panthers with multiple units of testosterone cream, which helps defeat testing on only hours' notice.
Low-dose testosterone and HGH are the most desired combination for beating testing in the NFL and NCAA football, according to news accounts, off-record sources of mine, and those whom Steve regularly consulted. In the cyber chat world, steroid forums, posters identify themselves as NCAA players and discuss "test" and "growth" for circumventing drug scans, among methods. Prep players join in, asking questions.
This only reflects culture, again. These days I meet many Average Joes on the juice for looks, weight loss, health, whatever they rationalize. They range in age from 20 to 50-somethings. I haven't juiced again since one steroid cycle in college ball, and I'm content with my body today at 6-2 and a solid 190. I diet well and still work out strenuously, despite hindrance of football injuries.
But in 20 years I'll hopefully reach 70 years old, and ask me then what I might try for hormone replacement and muscle restoration. Heck, ask me in 10 years, at age 60.
Many old footballers like the juice for hormone replacement, feeling younger and healthy, they believe. And synthetic or "recombinant" HGH is favored, as a biosimilar or DNA clone, versus synthetic testosterone and anabolic steroids considered harsher reacting.
Anonymous inside sources of mine and those Steve consulted contend many NFL retirees inject muscle drugs after their playing days, including some TV broadcasters, and published reports support the grapevine talk. Former lineman Brad Leggett and Ed Lothamer openly discussed their HGH use with journalists, and former quarterback Wade Wilson confirmed use after police disclosed his purchase from Internet dealers. In 2006, then-Steelers physician Dr. Richard A. Rydze purchased large HGH quantities from a cyber pharmacy, and investigators said an NFL retiree was mentioned among Rydze's clients for the drug, according to reporter Mike Fish of ESPN.com. Police probes also fingered active and injured players for acquiring HGH online: safety Rodney Harrison and quarterback Tim Couch.
Rumors of active players swirl about the anti-aging industry, and Steve heard names while looking into legal prescriptions of HGH and testosterone for himself in 2003. He was 48 in age, 15 years removed from his last cycle of steroids. "I was contemplating hormone-replacement therapy as a way to reverse the last of my cardiomyopathy," he said. "I talked to an anti-aging clinic not too far from me [in western Pennsylvania], and their main headquarters was in Palm Springs. I was testing the waters and getting information, still trying to make up my mind if I wanted to do this, before I decided against it.
"Well, in having a phone conversation with one of the main honchos in Palm Springs... he mentioned off-the-cuff a couple NFL [active] guys that they were providing with growth hormone. They were his clients. He said it real nonchalantly and they were big names. We're talkin' major names."
For decades NFL officials and players tried to deny growth-hormone use in the league, despite no test and mass marketing of the synthetic versions. Only a few players publicly alleged a problem existed, notably Howie Long, All-Pro defensive lineman of the 1980s and early '90s.
Official rhetoric has altered slightly under commissioner Roger Goodell, who succeeded Paul Tagliabue in 2006, but players and management stick to humorous claims. Union president Troy Vincent said genetic wonders inhabit the league, not juicers, suggesting baseball has more growth-hormone users than pro football.
Goodell says he doesn't believe significant use occurs in the NFL, and currently he explores the possibility of outsourcing league testing to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, WADA's American arm. The possibility is intriguing on several fronts, including that USADA utilizes the toothless test for HGH, which could obscure pro football's problem by churning out false-negative results, or data insufficient for withstanding legal challenge from affluent jocks.
Steve recognized the politics going down four years ago, when congressional heavies like Rep. Henry Waxman began suggesting pro sports should adopt "uniform" or "Olympic" testing. Government-funded and -influenced WADA and USADA lobby incessantly for gaining testing of pro sports, and the agencies are handy red herring as a "solution" for politicians such as Waxman.
Lawmakers bungle the issue today like their predecessors of 1989, when Congress promoted faulty random urinalysis for its adoption by the NFL and NCAA. Steve dealt with both fiascoes on Capitol Hill. "After two trips to Washington and analyzing information, it isn't hard to figure this out," he said. "What I see this going to, there's going to be a little play in Congress, because they have to, ya know, as far as the public goes. And they may push to get [NFL testing] under the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. That depends legally what's going on. ... But life will go on." And athletes will continue roaming the no-man's land Steve had inhabited, feeling unprotected, unable to resist doping.
"How would average Americans like going to work every day, knowing or feeling that they had to use a drug to compete in their workplace, yet couldn't freely talk about it," Steve said. "It's fucked up. The coercive aspect of it, it's terrible."
Football physiques, risks and disability
As a one-cycle juicer in college football, or a "dabbler" in steroid parlance, I didn't believe mere use doomed anyone to the proverbial bad end. I knew football was hazardous for my longterm, with my injuries of knee dislocation and nerve damage, but not 2,000 milligrams of testosterone injected over five weeks.
Later, analyzing sport doping during the 1990s, I sought conclusive proof of serious health consequences for steroid abuse. I wanted information to document my belief such extreme behavior was harmful, but no evidence transpired in the literature of clinical research.
Mainstream media were replete with claims that sounded plausible, such as the stricken Lyle Alzado, declaring his 22 years of crazy juicing caused fatal cancer. But there was no proof or expert consensus, and Alzado was rebuked by medical scientists for directly attributing his brain tumor to anabolic steroids. He died in 1992.
I considered the steroid users I knew in sport and bodybuilding, many longtime users and abusers. There were suspect signs in the worst cases, including an cardiac angina episode for one, but only acute effects of hormone cycling were apparent, hair loss, irritability, and pimply, pock-marked skin. I saw none of the health mayhem and death thrown about in typical news about steroids. Not even one certifiable 'roid rage, among juicers I knew. And thus my references to health hazards became less pronounced for public writings and media interviews about doping.
Steve Courson classified the rhetoric of exaggerated risk as "scare tactics," a manifestation of society's shallow moralizing against use that doesn't fool anyone seriously considering PEDs, particularly teens.
Sport's children of risk always see through the smokescreens about supposed dangers. Young athletes are determined and calculated for achieving success, and they know what's up with PEDs. In football, players don't see drugs kill and deform people over the short term, only peers who juice and thrive. "The fine line with kids is presenting facts in a balanced way, not overstating or understating reality, because kids will turn you off," Steve said. "If you give them one thing that's wrong, then they won't believe anything you've told them."
Getting to know Steve in 2005, I was impressed by his intellectual handling of health risks in doping. Steve had little use for supposition in his arguments, and he ignored common claims of deadly risks with steroids. I could have expected differently.
A decade previous, Steve sued the Bert Bell Fund of the NFLPA over his cardiomyopathy, seeking full disability compensation instead of the minimal amount he received, around $20,000 annually. Steve's lawsuit alleged steroids and other factors of pro football led to his condition, including alcohol abuse the institution encouraged. The civil action occurred in the 1990s, America's no-look decade for steroids in sport, and Steve was unpopular in the public arena, characterized as an ingrate jock attempting to rob the NFL for his own abuse of steroids and alcohol. He lost the court case too, for lack of supporting evidence.
Steve moved forward, seeking steroid-related information that he could stand on in persuasion about dangers. I was moving parallel with Steve in the issue, as my work blew up in the 1990s through study for my grad degree, capitalizing on electronic search of news and other databases.
By the time Steve and I finally collaborated, both of us were focused on football's increasing player sizes as risk for all levels. Reason or cause for the behemoth physiques wasn't our foremost concern, although anabolic drugs were the singlemost explanation, according to experts such as our mutual friend and associate Dr. Charles E. Yesalis, epidemiologist at Penn State.
A wealth of research and expert opinion supported our stance that physiques of American football were a health scourge, whether too-big players were obese, muscular, or a combination thereof. Some sports columnists argued similarly, including Rick Telander, Chicago, Dan O'Neill, St. Louis, and Sam Donnellon, Philadelphia. Then football-focused research hit the news, concluding most pro players qualified as overweight or obese according to criteria for the Body Mass Index; another study would produce correlate findings about prep lineman in Iowa. Thus hazards of football sizes were a presumption at that point, hardly debatable to the contrary.
Nevertheless, doctors and researchers affiliated with football did disagree, and so did NFL officials, claiming more information was required for conclusive judgment. Steve didn't care what they said.
"No matter what they do, they can't shut down the monster," he said. "They don't really understand, nor do they want to. But guys are continuing to get bigger and continuing to press the envelope. ... The issues of size are going to take their toll, if not immediately on the field, then not so later in life. But you're going to see somebody have a stroke or a heart attack right there on the field."
Prevailing evidence and opinion confirmed a range of potential maladies for excess weight, especially fat, while obesity could lead to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, hypertension and osteo-arthritis. During 2005, Steve expanded his crusade against obesity, viewing it as national health crisis and proposing that "eliminating obesity would put a massive dent in those needing early advanced health care."
For immediate danger and toll, super-sized dudes pounded each other on NFL fields, pulverizing bone, tissue, brain matter. Injuries were an issue, as always, including cases of paralysis, and debate on football concussions was firing up.
Steve saw drugs' imprint on the grid carnage, steroids, growth hormone and more. "Anyone who can think knows that players are bio-chemical machines, basically killer drones," he said. "I knew back in '82 and '83, when I really started getting into the anabolics, that I was a lethal machine at that point, with my parameters of size and speed. On or off the field I could really hurt somebody, and that scared even me."
Contemporary players really frightened Steve. Standard weights at his old guard position were 40, 50 pounds heavier, 310 to 325. NFL players weighing 300 were scarce in Steve's time, a few dozen perhaps; now about 400 players in training camps topped the mark, and some linemen pushed 400 on the scale. Steve was awed by the huge quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, linebackers, defensive backs. Modern players were so much bigger and athletic, surely employing stuff Steve had never used. "It's combination of 'growth' and anabolics--an androgen with GH," he estimated of the key difference.
Easy to understood why modern quarterbacks would "gear up" like anybody else. "Look at the shots they take from some of those creatures coming across the field," Steve said. "What I'd be worried about is somebody hitting me like an outside linebacker, about 260 running a 4.5. The D-linemen wouldn't scare me as much as those freakin' missiles coming at you now."
Steve figured collision death would soon strike a modern NFL player, killing him in the ferocious contact. "Amazing it hasn't happened yet," he said. "Fans and media want to see the big hit, but then everybody wants to see the guy get up. The entertainment's good, as long as you're not out there."
Steve also worried about NFL retirees, the serious illnesses and death haunting his age group and younger--or the generations most prone to drug use in the pharmaceutical age.
In just four months, from Christmas 2004 through mid-April 2005, six retirees died in their 40s of natural causes: Reggie White, Charles Martin, Reggie Roby, Todd Bell, David Little, and Sam Mills. None was ever accused publicly of drug use, and causes listed included heart disease, sleep apnea and cancer. Steve had his drug suspicions regarding the group as a whole, but he was more concerned with BMI ratings. All the men played pro ball as large specimens, per their respective standing heights, and several competed much heavier than healthy weights prescribed by the Body Mass Index. Steve viewed the sobering run of individual tragedies as another jolt of reality for widespread malaise, more rumbling of the big earthquake ahead for football.
"What I fear about the NFL, the bodies are just going to implode," Steve said. "Especially now that we're at the doorstep of genetic engineering. We're walking into a very scary bio-technical world."
Steve was transfixed on the growing battle over disability between retirees and the NFL, with concussions and permanent brain damage at the forefront of public discussion. Steve's own harrowing past was one thing, but he still grieved for close friend Mike Webster, a distressing story of dementia, depression, sensory loss and drug abuse. The Hall of Fame center was the iconic muscled lineman for the 1970s "Men of Steel," four-time Super Bowl champions, but "Webbie" died at age 50 in 2002, destitute.
Some friends said Webster was scattered in reasoning by his final years in pro football at Kansas City. His cause of death was listed as a heart attack, but the Webster family sued for retroactive compensation over his brain damage and won, claiming a judgment of almost $2 million from the NFLPA's retirement and disability board. The lengthy, acrimonious case set legal precedent for claims by more retirees.
Webster had several personal issues involved, Steve said, including dependence on painkillers and amphetamines. During the court case, medical documents disclosed Webster's "experimental" steroid use with the Steelers. "Now it's out there that he used steroids," Steve said. "The bottom line with Mike Webster, it's a real shame. Here's a guy that gave 17 years to the league, and you know the reason why he's no longer with us: The fact that the win-at-all-costs mentality in football, as much as anything, killed that man. The combination of the head, the medication, everything that went on; I mean, he's the prime example. We still don't want to be honest about the reality of what goes on out there. ... It's got to be embarrassing for the [Steelers] organization. It has to. That was so unnecessary."
Steve knew untold victims remained among retiree ranks, and while the NFL and union constituted a billion-dollar entertainment enterprise, Steve calculated there wasn't enough money to go around for adequate compensation. And the game's violent maw kept spitting out casualties, from preps to pro, thousands annually.
"The problems aren't going to be straightened out; I'm more convinced of this than ever, of what's going to happen," Steve said. "The machine basically eats its own, and it's going to end up self-destructing."
Drug openness, safety reform--or football implosion
Steve Courson granted an honesty mulligan for active athletes caught doping, as long as none got ridiculous enough to insult him in their denial.
But he objected to dishonesty or evasion by former jocks, especially NFL retirees who spoke publicly about muscle doping without remotely allowing what they knew. Steve's conflict with former Steeler teammates on the matter is well-documented among his autobiography, my book, and news accounts published by The Baltimore Sun and ESPN.com, reporters Jeff Barker and Mike Fish, respectively.
"Jockocrats" really irked Steve, the breed defined by sport critic and author Robert Lipsyte. These ex-NFLers were blessed with lucrative jobs post-football, yakking on television around games drawing boffo audience. Jockos were notorious as league apologists at the hint of doping scandal, or saying nothing at all. Moreover, Steve heard of one Jockocrat, at least, who used growth hormone for appearances sake. I also became acquainted with one who confirmed his HGH use.
On March 25, 2005, Steve raged about ESPN analyst and former Pittsburgh running back Merril Hoge, who vocally defended legendary coach Chuck Noll and old Steeler teams against steroid allegations from Jim Haslett, Saints head coach. Haslett admitted his juicing as a player and in the process implicated Steeler teams and even Steve by name. Steve didn't mind, and he commended Haslett for honesty during a live satellite interview on ESPN's "Cold Pizza" show.
Hoge followed Steve on camera, from the studio, disparaging Haslett and portraying Noll as vocally anti-steroid. Afterward, Steve fumed in an interview with me. "Merril was basically giving the company line, going through how Chuck Noll was always against this, and I'm biting my tongue," Steve said. "I'm thinking: 'Yeah, Merril, but why in 1989, when you were in Pittsburgh, did the Steelers draft Tom Ricketts and Craig Veasey, who had tested positive for steroids in the first and third rounds? And [there was] Terry Long, who tried to commit suicide after he tested positive. Chuck Noll never knew anything about this, huh? If Chuck Noll were so much against this, then why were all the guys who were taking steroids on the field, playing? Why weren't they sitting on the fucking bench? Gimme a break, you can't be that stupid."
"The lying is just so pathetic, and now it's being shown for how pathetic it really is... the hypocrisy is obviously driven by money."
Steve believed retirees' silence on steroids was already turning against them in the tempest over disability. The festering complete truth on drugs, he said, required addressing by retirees in discussing their ailments tied to football. Retirees talked publicly on almost any negative topic, but, like active players, few said anything material about steroids or growth hormone. Lack of openness about muscle doping was emblematic of wider denial by the football institution that approached fatal phase in the 2000s, we both believed, for varied issues that included medical costs.
Today, four years after Steve's death, the decade closes amid world economic crisis. American football already could be at brink of wholesale change, major downsizing, depending on fluid state of the insurance industry. Perhaps only costly private clubs and leagues can mean long survival for the sport, removed from public schools and colleges.
Contrary to popular belief, football isn't birth rite of the American male. Football doesn't even pay its own bills for damages, the multitude of knee injuries, concussions, unhealthy physiques, drug abuse and more. Insurance and healthcare pick up the slack and pass it on to consumers in higher costs.
Football is expensive indulgence for every American, fan or hater, and its doping problem will not continue unchecked forever. Ridiculous player sizes will ensure that. "They've gone too far with it as it is," Steve said, referring to the game institution, all personnel and associates. "They know drug testing can't solve their problem, it's just whether their greed and arrogance is going to kill 'em. ... Litigation is gonna kill 'em."
Steve and I didn't believe all was hopeless, however. Adopting size limits in football could provide immediate relief by capping use of anabolic substances, turning back obesity, and reducing injuries. Our general plan would restrict body weights according to the BMI, per individual frames. For example, a 6-foot-2 player could be allowed 25 percent above his highest normal BMI weight, or a limit of about 242 pounds for game eligibility.
But no good step is possible without first a revolutionary turnabout on self-disclosure by football, unprecedented public discussion. "Basically, you have to owe up to the cartoon," Steve said. "And for decades, the carton has been assisted with anabolic drugs. Hello."
Homerun PR tips for McGwire
Certainly when provoked, Steve Courson's razor criticism shredded jocks who dope and hide, cutting through facades to their core motives. But Steve was also a former big-time athlete who juiced; he had empathy. And he remained a fan of games and competitors, all ages.
Steve enjoyed Major League Baseball, and in 1998 he was like most Americans, mesmerized with the homerun drama of Mark McGwire versus Sammy Sosa, superstar sluggers of the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs.
McGwire and Sosa were even good buddies, proclaimed their attendant media flock, and the loving rivals hugged and back-slapped for cameras en route to obliterating Roger Maris' season homer record. Multiple media documented practically every move of the duo except drug use, and Steve consumed the happy mythology like everyone else.
Steve was sure Big Mac and Slammin' Sammy were juicers, heavy ones given their looks, and he wasn't surprised when AP reporter Steve Wilstein revealed McGwire used "andro," the anabolic-androgenic steroid. That didn't spoil the grand show for Steve, and America blasted the snooping reporter, not beloved Big Mac.
"The McGwire-Sosa thing? I knew what time it was. And I loved it!" Steve later recalled. Having no children himself, Steve took his cherished nephew to see McGwire in Pittsburgh, arriving early at the ballpark to witness Mac's unforgettable moon shots in batting practice.
Steve was fascinated of Big Mac legend in particular, anointing McGwire the quintessential figure for modern games. Sport was premier entertainment in the new world of perpetual media, having eclipsed Hollywood in pop culture, and McGwire was bigger than Brad Pitt. Steve, former calculated juicer of the NFL, ranked McGwire vintage '98 for epic stardom in sport, on par with Ruth, Jordan, Gretzky, Louis, spanning the century of celebrity athletes.
For historic talent in his time, McGwire combined natural athleticism, work ethic, mental preparation, and cutting-edge technology--especially drugs. Otherwise, Big Mac mania wouldn't have happened for the world. Steve couldn't have fathomed it.
So Steve was disappointed in the utter fall from grace for McGwire, who bottomed in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2005. A shrunken, cowering former athlete, Mac sniffed around steroid questions under oath, refusing to answer directly.
McGwire's disastrous appearance before Congress surprised Steve, who'd expected him to tell the truth, especially in light of the revelations from Jose Canseco's tell-all book Juiced and a New York Daily News expose that unleashed convincing allegations that Canseco and McGwire juiced together at Oakland in the early 1990s.
Canseco wrote of personally using steroids with McGwire on multiple occasions, and former FBI informants who had played roles in the FBI steroid sting Operation Equine of the early 1990s linked McGwire to a steroid dealer and training guru named Curtis Wenzlaff. The informants said Canseco and McGwire used steroids and protocols supplied by Wenzlaff, and one informant detailed a stacking recipe allegedly employed by the ballplayers.
The ballplayers weren't questioned--the FBI was going after suppliers, not users--but the new information silenced any question of McGwire's doping as far as Steve was concerned.
The night before McGwire testified, Steve played the role of advisor in an on-the-record interview with me, hypothetically recommending the proper approach for the cornered jock to take at Congress. Although McGwire didn't take Steve's advice to be open and honest, that advice remains useful for the disgraced hero, since McGwire, named the Cardinals hitting coach by manager Tony La Russa, will face questions and challenges by the time spring training opens in February, if not sooner.
"There's times in life where you've got to speak your piece," Steve told me on March 16, 2005. "And if I were McGwire, this is what I would say: 'Yeah, I doped, and I feel embarrassed by it. But I did it in part to enhance my own ability, my own training, and to make myself a better ballplayer. I also did in part to help the game of baseball be more entertaining.' If he would say that, I think the public could handle it."
"I think people would appreciate it if he came clean, finally," I said.
"And explained why he did it," Steve reiterated. "He could explain in terms that everybody could understand. Explain that he denied it for so long because he didn't want little kids following his route."
"But baseball's spiral of silence about doping," I noted. "McGwire's bound by the code--"
"No, he's not," Steve answered quickly. "He's retired... he's got no excuse. I'm sorry."
E-mail: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information on Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.
By Matt Chaney
Posted November 24, 2009
For this writing I remember a fine friend in Steve Courson, who died in a tree-cutting accident on November 10, 2005, at age 50. As in sudden death, questions go unanswered for family and friends of Steve, particularly for his future lost. He was an extraordinary individual, vibrant and talented.
But no one has to wonder what Steve would say today about drugs in sport, the contemporary headlines of the issue he ruled.
Steve would let rip with the same talking points he'd built and honed by the final year of his life. After 20 years working the public debate over sport doping, he was expert like no other, with honesty and multi-experience keeping him at vortex of the volatile issue.
He began with simple anabolic-steroid use in major-college football, 1973, a teenager bent on winning, handed a doctor's prescription for Dianabol pills paid by the University of South Carolina. Steve graduated to studious abuse of steroids in pro football, injections within drug combinations, and he blew open the NFL's worst-kept secret in 1985: Unflinchingly, Steve discussed his steroid aid and football's systemic problem for a milestone story in Sports Illustrated, then the world's premier sporting publication.
Summarily tossed from the league, Steve was forced into retirement at age 31, but soon a devastating problem emerged: Doctors diagnosed him with dilated cardiomyopathy, damage to the heart's intricate muscle fibers. Steve suspected football lifestyle had spurred his grave illness, including steroid abuse, maniacal exertion, massive weight gain and alcohol abuse, and doctors placed him on a heart-transplant list for years.
As Steve fought through a slow recovery, he continued study of sport doping, meticulously documenting his argument for writings, speeches and media quotes. He saw a doping epidemic in American football, but pointed to a larger problem, pandemic in scope, the human embrace of drugs and more synthetics for enhancing physical performance and image. Twenty years ago, Steve charged the grandest hypocrisy lay in cultural affinity to blame mere individuals, a dangerous denial prone to manifest in ugly spectacles such as media and lawmaker floggings of the few athletes exposed for muscle doping.
He met teens and parents on a speaking circuit, informing them about PEDs, attesting to inherent risks for mind and body. All the while he existed barely above poverty level, beset by medical bills while losing $500,000 in bad investments. He was obese and in fragile state, bloated above 300 pounds due to medical procedures and inability to exercise stressfully.
Steve testified for Congress a first time in 1989, and he penned journal articles and book chapters on drug history in sport. In 1991 he produced False Glory [Longmeadow Press], his first-person account of brutal personal compromise for excelling in football--such as the athlete's submission to drug use. The book was critically acclaimed but didn't sell well, lacking tell-all sensationalism because Steve wouldn't name his drug cohorts in football, including superstars. He received just a few thousand dollars for years of book research and writing.
Steve regained health, year by year. Eventually doctors removed him from the transplant list, and they declared his condition completely reversed in 2004. With a clean bill of health, not to mention an incredibly cut body at 245 pounds, Steve proudly ended his modest disability compensation from the NFL and players union.
Meanwhile, Steve gained overdue recognition as a foremost expert on doping, while BALCO revelations led a torrent of scandalous news about athletes, actors, musicians, police officers and more public figures. Steve was a busy man in 2005, writing, speaking, granting interviews, and he testified on Capitol Hill for a final time.
Steve and I conversed frequently that year, mostly via telephone and daily in some stretches. Periodically, I interviewed him on-record for my book on muscle drugs in football, taping about 20 hours of discussion between us. I had much in common with Steve, as a former steroid user in college football [1982, Southeast Missouri State] who had also moved into study, writing and speaking openly on the problem.
This essay features Steve's perspective on doping topics at end of his life, culled from interviews with me. Most comments were previously unpublished, with a portion appearing in my recent book, Spiral of Denial.
Steve's views resonate today, relevant yet, and that is in part for his expertise, a credit to him. But their power lives too because nothing has reversed rampant doping in Steve's wake, and that is discredit to human nature.
Steve's on-record comments are juxtaposed with current doping events or scandal springing from the same maladies of his time. Topics include the following: invalid testing or useless anti-doping; undetectable substances like human growth hormone and low-dose testosterone; health and disability; obfuscation by officials in sport and anti-doping; hedged insider confessions or acknowledgments, and outright denial by athletes, media and fans; and future implosion for the football institution over player sizes, drugs, secrecy, medical costs and liability. Steve does empathize for the athlete's dilemma with PEDs, and his life demonstrates honesty can imperil more than a jock's personal sporting legend.
Timely comments even cover Mark McGwire, who's spent most this decade in seclusion, evading questions about his apparent doping in baseball. Steve's insider advice is still useful to McGwire, particularly for the disgraced slugger's pending news conference, certain to be a fiery reentry to public life as Cardinals hitting coach.
Truth and denial
In 2005 Steve Courson loved the comedy parade of lying athletes, their outrageous denials against allegations or queries regarding performance-enhancing substances. Steve's voice and laugh were deep, booming within a closed room, and he roared at baseball star Sammy Sosa's televised act before Congress, when the outgoing Dominican suddenly got quiet, halting at steroid questions under oath, nervously twiddling pages of his prop English primer.
Steve anticipated the Sosa reaction for typical juicing jocks caught red-handed, their mumbling and stammering in acknowledgments that were incomplete, dubious, nonsensical or downright silly. "When you look at all the people who have talked about this...," Steve said, "it's either they did it for an injury; they didn't realize it was a steroid; it was a [tainted] supplement; or they just did it once. I mean, they're at the point of looking ridiculous."
Steve would howl at today's clownish stars of the so-called full confessional, like Andy Pettitte, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz in baseball. Whining and crying about "making a mistake" with PEDs has gained popularity among athletes, especially those facing public pressure based on strong evidence of guilt. Jocks might only vaguely recall their doping, yet they reap public-relations return by deflating scandal.
But flimsy excuses, Steve would actually understand. He didn't condemn an active athlete for evasion or outright denial. Foremost, Steve contended the modern athlete turns to PEDs for merely competing in a drug-soaked environment.
Besides, openness was hazardous. In strictly pragmatic terms, Steve recommended the tainted athlete to decline comment, reveal nothing for career sake--or opt for that fake contrition by issuing cheesy excuse and apology. Steve used himself as example for honesty's consequences, his lost opportunity and finances over speaking out, which provoked football forces and their tentacle influence throughout society.
"I've gone through 20 years of bullshit, for speaking just the truth," he said a few months before his death. "And it's the truth that everyone knew. I'm still trying to figure out what happened. ... What about punishing teams for the discretions of their players? Because don't be foolish enough to believe their coaches don't know."
Image preservation for the lying or evasive athlete, Steve insisted, is motivated by security concern as much as ego or vanity. And within doping hysteria of 2000s America, the user athlete must worry about grand juries, criminal charges, and summons by politicians to testify. Just a few celebrity athletes caught doping feed the political processes for years.
"We realize that we live in a very image-conscious society," Steve said, "and nowhere in society is image more paramount than the world of sport. It's everything, for whatever reason, and nobody wants to compromise his image because of the stigma associated with steroid use."
Sport and society trash individual athletes who get caught as "part of the institutional strategy," Steve said. "Basically, the theory of 'a few bad apples' has been historically employed as sports propaganda. Therefore, when you consider all those factors, and then you combine 'em with the fact that, as of 1990, [steroids are] against the law, and the huge money involved, [denial] shouldn't surprise anybody."
However, Steve wouldn't have done differently in spring 1985, when SI investigator reporter Jill Lieber called him cold to ask whether he used steroids. He still would've answered, "Yes."
"I look at it this way...," he recalled. "Here I was, responding to my [football] environment, and I had the love-hate relationship with the drugs. I loved what they did for my training, but I hated compromising myself to a system where I felt I had to do it to retain my employment. ... I felt like I was in no-man's land. I just felt caught."
Steve wasn't subject to steroid punishment by the NFL; the league hadn't yet devised a policy. But he was bound by the game's code of silence, especially regarding widespread steroid use, and he was sick of it.
"The game is full of compromises," he said. "We compromise ourselves when we go to training camp. We'd rather be at the beach. We compromise when we have some jerk-off coach run you down in front of your teammates, humiliate you, because it's all part of making the team better, and you hold yourself back. You compromise when they stick the pain-killing needle into your knee when they need you to play. So the drugs are just another compromise."
"And, for me in 1985, I make all those compromises to play that game, and then I'm starting to have some health problems. ... I'm caught between these extremes here, and now I'm being asked to tell the truth about this. I'll compromise to a point, but I'm not going to lie about it. I was willing to compromise to do what I did, use the anabolic drugs."
"I would do all that for them [the NFL], but not lie for them."
User rationale
"To be honest, I liked playing football," Steve said in 2005. "Despite all the bullshit, I liked the game, you know. There's something about it; personally, it was the camaraderie, and the challenge of it. ... That continued to drive me to use the drugs, even though I got to the point where I didn't want to do 'em. I never really was that crazy about doing 'em, but then again... you invest all that time. You pour yourself totally into that game, it's real hard to step back."
"I think the big thing is--and what really gets obscured in all this, as far as athletes--athletes respond to their environment. If you look at my drug use throughout my career, I responded to my environment and my challenges. ... When you talk to most athletes, nobody likes [PEDs] but they feel they have to. And I think that is pretty universal."
Entering college football at age 17, Steve was already a wonder of genetics and work ethic, a great package of speed, power and size at 6-foot-2, 230 pounds, with 4.7-second time in the 40-yard dash. But he still needed drug augmentation, to succeed as a lineman in the big time.
A self-taught weightlifter in the 1960s and early 1970s, Steve bench-pressed 400 pounds as a senior in high school Then, at South Carolina, "I was just thrust into an environment where I was up against bigger, older guys, as a young kid," he said. "I knew I had to get bigger to do what I needed to do... . By the time I got to SC, strength-wise I'd pretty much hit the wall. I could've gotten bigger over time when I was in college, but I probably only would've gained 10 more pounds."
Encouraged toward steroids by a young assistant coach, Steve did only a six-week cycle of standard 5-milligram Dianabol tablets, therapeutic dosage, while training intensely and gorging on food. His genetically gifted body really responded to the drugs; his 40 time improved to 4.5, his bench press increased 50 pounds, and his weight expanded 30 to a size, mostly lean mass, that he maintained the rest of college football.
He upped the cycle of D-bol in the summer 1977, as a fifth-round draft pick of the Steelers, consuming one 15-mg tab daily for six weeks. "The second cycle, which I thought was huge at the time, I was so naive; that was less than a lot of women sprinters use today. So, in retrospect, I was near a 500-pound bench [press] with dosages of steroids that were actually minuscule."
"And when did my drug use take the next big leaps? When I was competing in the NFL strong-man competitions. Then, toward the end of my career, being regarded as one of the stronger players and competing in powerlifting."
By 1982 Steve was versed in steroid how-to information and had gathered anecdotal advice from juicers throughout football and weightlifting. He stacked multiple injectable and oral steroids in protocols considered state-of-art for the time, with his body weight reaching 285 pounds for the Steelers and his bench press around 575. With 405 on the bar, he cranked out 14 repetitions.
I asked Steve: "You never felt you were getting that far ahead of anybody? Your increasing use of steroids, to the point of abuse, was a response to your escalating environments?"
He laughed. "Well, part of it was response, but response in wanting to dominate. I was not there to bring up the trail."
"And who is content to be just an NFL special-teams guy, or third-teamer?" I suggested.
No one, Steve affirmed. "That's why unless they develop a testing technology that's foolproof, don't even think those drugs are going anywhere."
Steve didn't believe valid testing was possible without a fortune in funding for research and development. In 1989 he told Congress that doping's popular solution of the moment, random urinalysis, couldn't work effectively against techniques such as undetectable HGH, low-dose testosterone and designer steroids. During that period, Steve advocated open use of muscle drugs for elite athletes, under doctor supervision, but later abandoned the stance for concern about teenagers and modeling effect.
By 2005, Steve saw steroids as having saturated prep football, based on evidence that included invalid prevention, Internet accessibility, street dealers, and news reports. Moreover, he privately discussed the matter with teens, parents and coaches.
"Today, it starts in high school," he said. "[Teen players] learn about the drugs and how they work. Then they learn about beating detection in college football, and by the time any get to the NFL, they've learned how to be tested and they know the score."
Invalid testing, red herring of anti-doping
The stark fact of sport doping in continuum, now spanning generations of competitors such as fathers and sons in football, is that higher-aspiring athletes are confronted by the question of whether to employ anabolic steroids and more tissue-building hormones.
The athlete's drug dilemma typically begins in teen years, during high school, and always by college. Often a parent, relative or family friend is the persuasive informant and first source for muscle drugs, primarily steroids and costly HGH, according to news reports and information I've gathered for years from witnesses speaking off-record.
Yet America wants to believe that testing is effective against muscle doping in sport, particularly beloved football, our cultural religion of brute violence most conducive to drug use.
And America tries to frame the doping football player within a familiar, foolish stereotype: the isolated individual committed to cheating against the large majority dedicated to fair play--or the majority afraid to juice because testing is so effective, as testing promoters spin it.
This dangerous misconception is nurtured along by the officials of anti-doping, or sport organizers and testing contractors, since advent of steroid urinalysis at the 1976 Olympic Games. In football and all sport, steroid testing is a false hope that serves to absolve the system, blame players alone, and promote societal denial.
Meanwhile, muscle drugs roll on in football, a half-century since Dianabol's release, sweeping up new young players annually by the thousands, all levels. Guys keep getting bigger, deadlier for themselves as well as peers, and Steve wouldn't be surprised.
"The industry wants athletes to compete in a win-at-all-costs environment, which means they're gonna take drugs, yet pretend that they're not," he said in 2005.
Steve believed, as I do, that athletes would overwhelmingly support valid anti-doping--including monitoring that invaded privacy like year-round testing--as long as the vast majority could truly play clean and compete. That's impossible, unfortunately, for the near term and likely forever.
Conventional testing is unequivocally fault-ridden, subject to methods of evasion that include timing patented steroids around scanning periods, or employing undetectable substances year-round. Low-dose testosterone and growth hormone fly under conventional screening.
The so-called HGH blood test ballyhooed by Olympic and WADA officials is woefully inadequate, say experts, for problems such as high cost and a detection window of only hours following an athlete's use. More methodological cracks are unlikely to withstand a court challenge, particularly the test's lack of vetting by independent scientists. The prominent naysayers include two testing experts associated with WADA, Dr. Don Catlin and Dr. Peter Sonksen. Indeed, WADA hasn't announced one suspension for HGH despite years of blood sampling among thousands of Olympic athletes.
Unknown designer steroids are undoubtedly in circulation, with anti-doping authorities having identified about three in a quarter-century of the ghostly drugs. Catlin calculates 2,000 varieties are possible.
And the grandiose, expensive, struggling new initiative of blood-profiling, purported to identify drug use without reliance on chemical or bio signatures, offers no potential for helping the masses of amateur athletes. Even if such monitoring works effectively and can overcome legal challenges--critics say likely not on both counts--it is cost-prohibitive for deployment among a vast population such as American football, which includes about 1.5 million teen players scattered among 15,000 school districts.
Bottom line in football, anti-doping does not protect the player from drugged rivals, despite the 1994 California court ruling that testing must ensure athletes' safety and competitive fairness--the compelling mission that appellate judges determined supersedes individual right of privacy.
HGH in football
Growth hormone was used in NFL and NCAA football by 1985, players later reported, but Steve didn't encounter it until after retiring. "It was late '87, beginning of '88. I was training because I was thinking about pro wrestling. I was hittin' the gym and hittin' [steroids] again, and I would periodically run into some of the current players. Through interaction with them, I was clued in that some were using HGH. That was the first time they were facing non-punitive drug testing in the NFL."
"From what I understand, growth hormone works better when you supplement it with an androgen like testosterone." Steve noted the 2000s Carolina Panthers players who received HGH and steroids from Dr. James Shorrt, the South Carolina physician convicted of illegal dispensing and sentenced to a year in prison. During football season, Shortt provided some Panthers with multiple units of testosterone cream, which helps defeat testing on only hours' notice.
Low-dose testosterone and HGH are the most desired combination for beating testing in the NFL and NCAA football, according to news accounts, off-record sources of mine, and those whom Steve regularly consulted. In the cyber chat world, steroid forums, posters identify themselves as NCAA players and discuss "test" and "growth" for circumventing drug scans, among methods. Prep players join in, asking questions.
This only reflects culture, again. These days I meet many Average Joes on the juice for looks, weight loss, health, whatever they rationalize. They range in age from 20 to 50-somethings. I haven't juiced again since one steroid cycle in college ball, and I'm content with my body today at 6-2 and a solid 190. I diet well and still work out strenuously, despite hindrance of football injuries.
But in 20 years I'll hopefully reach 70 years old, and ask me then what I might try for hormone replacement and muscle restoration. Heck, ask me in 10 years, at age 60.
Many old footballers like the juice for hormone replacement, feeling younger and healthy, they believe. And synthetic or "recombinant" HGH is favored, as a biosimilar or DNA clone, versus synthetic testosterone and anabolic steroids considered harsher reacting.
Anonymous inside sources of mine and those Steve consulted contend many NFL retirees inject muscle drugs after their playing days, including some TV broadcasters, and published reports support the grapevine talk. Former lineman Brad Leggett and Ed Lothamer openly discussed their HGH use with journalists, and former quarterback Wade Wilson confirmed use after police disclosed his purchase from Internet dealers. In 2006, then-Steelers physician Dr. Richard A. Rydze purchased large HGH quantities from a cyber pharmacy, and investigators said an NFL retiree was mentioned among Rydze's clients for the drug, according to reporter Mike Fish of ESPN.com. Police probes also fingered active and injured players for acquiring HGH online: safety Rodney Harrison and quarterback Tim Couch.
Rumors of active players swirl about the anti-aging industry, and Steve heard names while looking into legal prescriptions of HGH and testosterone for himself in 2003. He was 48 in age, 15 years removed from his last cycle of steroids. "I was contemplating hormone-replacement therapy as a way to reverse the last of my cardiomyopathy," he said. "I talked to an anti-aging clinic not too far from me [in western Pennsylvania], and their main headquarters was in Palm Springs. I was testing the waters and getting information, still trying to make up my mind if I wanted to do this, before I decided against it.
"Well, in having a phone conversation with one of the main honchos in Palm Springs... he mentioned off-the-cuff a couple NFL [active] guys that they were providing with growth hormone. They were his clients. He said it real nonchalantly and they were big names. We're talkin' major names."
For decades NFL officials and players tried to deny growth-hormone use in the league, despite no test and mass marketing of the synthetic versions. Only a few players publicly alleged a problem existed, notably Howie Long, All-Pro defensive lineman of the 1980s and early '90s.
Official rhetoric has altered slightly under commissioner Roger Goodell, who succeeded Paul Tagliabue in 2006, but players and management stick to humorous claims. Union president Troy Vincent said genetic wonders inhabit the league, not juicers, suggesting baseball has more growth-hormone users than pro football.
Goodell says he doesn't believe significant use occurs in the NFL, and currently he explores the possibility of outsourcing league testing to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, WADA's American arm. The possibility is intriguing on several fronts, including that USADA utilizes the toothless test for HGH, which could obscure pro football's problem by churning out false-negative results, or data insufficient for withstanding legal challenge from affluent jocks.
Steve recognized the politics going down four years ago, when congressional heavies like Rep. Henry Waxman began suggesting pro sports should adopt "uniform" or "Olympic" testing. Government-funded and -influenced WADA and USADA lobby incessantly for gaining testing of pro sports, and the agencies are handy red herring as a "solution" for politicians such as Waxman.
Lawmakers bungle the issue today like their predecessors of 1989, when Congress promoted faulty random urinalysis for its adoption by the NFL and NCAA. Steve dealt with both fiascoes on Capitol Hill. "After two trips to Washington and analyzing information, it isn't hard to figure this out," he said. "What I see this going to, there's going to be a little play in Congress, because they have to, ya know, as far as the public goes. And they may push to get [NFL testing] under the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. That depends legally what's going on. ... But life will go on." And athletes will continue roaming the no-man's land Steve had inhabited, feeling unprotected, unable to resist doping.
"How would average Americans like going to work every day, knowing or feeling that they had to use a drug to compete in their workplace, yet couldn't freely talk about it," Steve said. "It's fucked up. The coercive aspect of it, it's terrible."
Football physiques, risks and disability
As a one-cycle juicer in college football, or a "dabbler" in steroid parlance, I didn't believe mere use doomed anyone to the proverbial bad end. I knew football was hazardous for my longterm, with my injuries of knee dislocation and nerve damage, but not 2,000 milligrams of testosterone injected over five weeks.
Later, analyzing sport doping during the 1990s, I sought conclusive proof of serious health consequences for steroid abuse. I wanted information to document my belief such extreme behavior was harmful, but no evidence transpired in the literature of clinical research.
Mainstream media were replete with claims that sounded plausible, such as the stricken Lyle Alzado, declaring his 22 years of crazy juicing caused fatal cancer. But there was no proof or expert consensus, and Alzado was rebuked by medical scientists for directly attributing his brain tumor to anabolic steroids. He died in 1992.
I considered the steroid users I knew in sport and bodybuilding, many longtime users and abusers. There were suspect signs in the worst cases, including an cardiac angina episode for one, but only acute effects of hormone cycling were apparent, hair loss, irritability, and pimply, pock-marked skin. I saw none of the health mayhem and death thrown about in typical news about steroids. Not even one certifiable 'roid rage, among juicers I knew. And thus my references to health hazards became less pronounced for public writings and media interviews about doping.
Steve Courson classified the rhetoric of exaggerated risk as "scare tactics," a manifestation of society's shallow moralizing against use that doesn't fool anyone seriously considering PEDs, particularly teens.
Sport's children of risk always see through the smokescreens about supposed dangers. Young athletes are determined and calculated for achieving success, and they know what's up with PEDs. In football, players don't see drugs kill and deform people over the short term, only peers who juice and thrive. "The fine line with kids is presenting facts in a balanced way, not overstating or understating reality, because kids will turn you off," Steve said. "If you give them one thing that's wrong, then they won't believe anything you've told them."
Getting to know Steve in 2005, I was impressed by his intellectual handling of health risks in doping. Steve had little use for supposition in his arguments, and he ignored common claims of deadly risks with steroids. I could have expected differently.
A decade previous, Steve sued the Bert Bell Fund of the NFLPA over his cardiomyopathy, seeking full disability compensation instead of the minimal amount he received, around $20,000 annually. Steve's lawsuit alleged steroids and other factors of pro football led to his condition, including alcohol abuse the institution encouraged. The civil action occurred in the 1990s, America's no-look decade for steroids in sport, and Steve was unpopular in the public arena, characterized as an ingrate jock attempting to rob the NFL for his own abuse of steroids and alcohol. He lost the court case too, for lack of supporting evidence.
Steve moved forward, seeking steroid-related information that he could stand on in persuasion about dangers. I was moving parallel with Steve in the issue, as my work blew up in the 1990s through study for my grad degree, capitalizing on electronic search of news and other databases.
By the time Steve and I finally collaborated, both of us were focused on football's increasing player sizes as risk for all levels. Reason or cause for the behemoth physiques wasn't our foremost concern, although anabolic drugs were the singlemost explanation, according to experts such as our mutual friend and associate Dr. Charles E. Yesalis, epidemiologist at Penn State.
A wealth of research and expert opinion supported our stance that physiques of American football were a health scourge, whether too-big players were obese, muscular, or a combination thereof. Some sports columnists argued similarly, including Rick Telander, Chicago, Dan O'Neill, St. Louis, and Sam Donnellon, Philadelphia. Then football-focused research hit the news, concluding most pro players qualified as overweight or obese according to criteria for the Body Mass Index; another study would produce correlate findings about prep lineman in Iowa. Thus hazards of football sizes were a presumption at that point, hardly debatable to the contrary.
Nevertheless, doctors and researchers affiliated with football did disagree, and so did NFL officials, claiming more information was required for conclusive judgment. Steve didn't care what they said.
"No matter what they do, they can't shut down the monster," he said. "They don't really understand, nor do they want to. But guys are continuing to get bigger and continuing to press the envelope. ... The issues of size are going to take their toll, if not immediately on the field, then not so later in life. But you're going to see somebody have a stroke or a heart attack right there on the field."
Prevailing evidence and opinion confirmed a range of potential maladies for excess weight, especially fat, while obesity could lead to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, hypertension and osteo-arthritis. During 2005, Steve expanded his crusade against obesity, viewing it as national health crisis and proposing that "eliminating obesity would put a massive dent in those needing early advanced health care."
For immediate danger and toll, super-sized dudes pounded each other on NFL fields, pulverizing bone, tissue, brain matter. Injuries were an issue, as always, including cases of paralysis, and debate on football concussions was firing up.
Steve saw drugs' imprint on the grid carnage, steroids, growth hormone and more. "Anyone who can think knows that players are bio-chemical machines, basically killer drones," he said. "I knew back in '82 and '83, when I really started getting into the anabolics, that I was a lethal machine at that point, with my parameters of size and speed. On or off the field I could really hurt somebody, and that scared even me."
Contemporary players really frightened Steve. Standard weights at his old guard position were 40, 50 pounds heavier, 310 to 325. NFL players weighing 300 were scarce in Steve's time, a few dozen perhaps; now about 400 players in training camps topped the mark, and some linemen pushed 400 on the scale. Steve was awed by the huge quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, linebackers, defensive backs. Modern players were so much bigger and athletic, surely employing stuff Steve had never used. "It's combination of 'growth' and anabolics--an androgen with GH," he estimated of the key difference.
Easy to understood why modern quarterbacks would "gear up" like anybody else. "Look at the shots they take from some of those creatures coming across the field," Steve said. "What I'd be worried about is somebody hitting me like an outside linebacker, about 260 running a 4.5. The D-linemen wouldn't scare me as much as those freakin' missiles coming at you now."
Steve figured collision death would soon strike a modern NFL player, killing him in the ferocious contact. "Amazing it hasn't happened yet," he said. "Fans and media want to see the big hit, but then everybody wants to see the guy get up. The entertainment's good, as long as you're not out there."
Steve also worried about NFL retirees, the serious illnesses and death haunting his age group and younger--or the generations most prone to drug use in the pharmaceutical age.
In just four months, from Christmas 2004 through mid-April 2005, six retirees died in their 40s of natural causes: Reggie White, Charles Martin, Reggie Roby, Todd Bell, David Little, and Sam Mills. None was ever accused publicly of drug use, and causes listed included heart disease, sleep apnea and cancer. Steve had his drug suspicions regarding the group as a whole, but he was more concerned with BMI ratings. All the men played pro ball as large specimens, per their respective standing heights, and several competed much heavier than healthy weights prescribed by the Body Mass Index. Steve viewed the sobering run of individual tragedies as another jolt of reality for widespread malaise, more rumbling of the big earthquake ahead for football.
"What I fear about the NFL, the bodies are just going to implode," Steve said. "Especially now that we're at the doorstep of genetic engineering. We're walking into a very scary bio-technical world."
Steve was transfixed on the growing battle over disability between retirees and the NFL, with concussions and permanent brain damage at the forefront of public discussion. Steve's own harrowing past was one thing, but he still grieved for close friend Mike Webster, a distressing story of dementia, depression, sensory loss and drug abuse. The Hall of Fame center was the iconic muscled lineman for the 1970s "Men of Steel," four-time Super Bowl champions, but "Webbie" died at age 50 in 2002, destitute.
Some friends said Webster was scattered in reasoning by his final years in pro football at Kansas City. His cause of death was listed as a heart attack, but the Webster family sued for retroactive compensation over his brain damage and won, claiming a judgment of almost $2 million from the NFLPA's retirement and disability board. The lengthy, acrimonious case set legal precedent for claims by more retirees.
Webster had several personal issues involved, Steve said, including dependence on painkillers and amphetamines. During the court case, medical documents disclosed Webster's "experimental" steroid use with the Steelers. "Now it's out there that he used steroids," Steve said. "The bottom line with Mike Webster, it's a real shame. Here's a guy that gave 17 years to the league, and you know the reason why he's no longer with us: The fact that the win-at-all-costs mentality in football, as much as anything, killed that man. The combination of the head, the medication, everything that went on; I mean, he's the prime example. We still don't want to be honest about the reality of what goes on out there. ... It's got to be embarrassing for the [Steelers] organization. It has to. That was so unnecessary."
Steve knew untold victims remained among retiree ranks, and while the NFL and union constituted a billion-dollar entertainment enterprise, Steve calculated there wasn't enough money to go around for adequate compensation. And the game's violent maw kept spitting out casualties, from preps to pro, thousands annually.
"The problems aren't going to be straightened out; I'm more convinced of this than ever, of what's going to happen," Steve said. "The machine basically eats its own, and it's going to end up self-destructing."
Drug openness, safety reform--or football implosion
Steve Courson granted an honesty mulligan for active athletes caught doping, as long as none got ridiculous enough to insult him in their denial.
But he objected to dishonesty or evasion by former jocks, especially NFL retirees who spoke publicly about muscle doping without remotely allowing what they knew. Steve's conflict with former Steeler teammates on the matter is well-documented among his autobiography, my book, and news accounts published by The Baltimore Sun and ESPN.com, reporters Jeff Barker and Mike Fish, respectively.
"Jockocrats" really irked Steve, the breed defined by sport critic and author Robert Lipsyte. These ex-NFLers were blessed with lucrative jobs post-football, yakking on television around games drawing boffo audience. Jockos were notorious as league apologists at the hint of doping scandal, or saying nothing at all. Moreover, Steve heard of one Jockocrat, at least, who used growth hormone for appearances sake. I also became acquainted with one who confirmed his HGH use.
On March 25, 2005, Steve raged about ESPN analyst and former Pittsburgh running back Merril Hoge, who vocally defended legendary coach Chuck Noll and old Steeler teams against steroid allegations from Jim Haslett, Saints head coach. Haslett admitted his juicing as a player and in the process implicated Steeler teams and even Steve by name. Steve didn't mind, and he commended Haslett for honesty during a live satellite interview on ESPN's "Cold Pizza" show.
Hoge followed Steve on camera, from the studio, disparaging Haslett and portraying Noll as vocally anti-steroid. Afterward, Steve fumed in an interview with me. "Merril was basically giving the company line, going through how Chuck Noll was always against this, and I'm biting my tongue," Steve said. "I'm thinking: 'Yeah, Merril, but why in 1989, when you were in Pittsburgh, did the Steelers draft Tom Ricketts and Craig Veasey, who had tested positive for steroids in the first and third rounds? And [there was] Terry Long, who tried to commit suicide after he tested positive. Chuck Noll never knew anything about this, huh? If Chuck Noll were so much against this, then why were all the guys who were taking steroids on the field, playing? Why weren't they sitting on the fucking bench? Gimme a break, you can't be that stupid."
"The lying is just so pathetic, and now it's being shown for how pathetic it really is... the hypocrisy is obviously driven by money."
Steve believed retirees' silence on steroids was already turning against them in the tempest over disability. The festering complete truth on drugs, he said, required addressing by retirees in discussing their ailments tied to football. Retirees talked publicly on almost any negative topic, but, like active players, few said anything material about steroids or growth hormone. Lack of openness about muscle doping was emblematic of wider denial by the football institution that approached fatal phase in the 2000s, we both believed, for varied issues that included medical costs.
Today, four years after Steve's death, the decade closes amid world economic crisis. American football already could be at brink of wholesale change, major downsizing, depending on fluid state of the insurance industry. Perhaps only costly private clubs and leagues can mean long survival for the sport, removed from public schools and colleges.
Contrary to popular belief, football isn't birth rite of the American male. Football doesn't even pay its own bills for damages, the multitude of knee injuries, concussions, unhealthy physiques, drug abuse and more. Insurance and healthcare pick up the slack and pass it on to consumers in higher costs.
Football is expensive indulgence for every American, fan or hater, and its doping problem will not continue unchecked forever. Ridiculous player sizes will ensure that. "They've gone too far with it as it is," Steve said, referring to the game institution, all personnel and associates. "They know drug testing can't solve their problem, it's just whether their greed and arrogance is going to kill 'em. ... Litigation is gonna kill 'em."
Steve and I didn't believe all was hopeless, however. Adopting size limits in football could provide immediate relief by capping use of anabolic substances, turning back obesity, and reducing injuries. Our general plan would restrict body weights according to the BMI, per individual frames. For example, a 6-foot-2 player could be allowed 25 percent above his highest normal BMI weight, or a limit of about 242 pounds for game eligibility.
But no good step is possible without first a revolutionary turnabout on self-disclosure by football, unprecedented public discussion. "Basically, you have to owe up to the cartoon," Steve said. "And for decades, the carton has been assisted with anabolic drugs. Hello."
Homerun PR tips for McGwire
Certainly when provoked, Steve Courson's razor criticism shredded jocks who dope and hide, cutting through facades to their core motives. But Steve was also a former big-time athlete who juiced; he had empathy. And he remained a fan of games and competitors, all ages.
Steve enjoyed Major League Baseball, and in 1998 he was like most Americans, mesmerized with the homerun drama of Mark McGwire versus Sammy Sosa, superstar sluggers of the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs.
McGwire and Sosa were even good buddies, proclaimed their attendant media flock, and the loving rivals hugged and back-slapped for cameras en route to obliterating Roger Maris' season homer record. Multiple media documented practically every move of the duo except drug use, and Steve consumed the happy mythology like everyone else.
Steve was sure Big Mac and Slammin' Sammy were juicers, heavy ones given their looks, and he wasn't surprised when AP reporter Steve Wilstein revealed McGwire used "andro," the anabolic-androgenic steroid. That didn't spoil the grand show for Steve, and America blasted the snooping reporter, not beloved Big Mac.
"The McGwire-Sosa thing? I knew what time it was. And I loved it!" Steve later recalled. Having no children himself, Steve took his cherished nephew to see McGwire in Pittsburgh, arriving early at the ballpark to witness Mac's unforgettable moon shots in batting practice.
Steve was fascinated of Big Mac legend in particular, anointing McGwire the quintessential figure for modern games. Sport was premier entertainment in the new world of perpetual media, having eclipsed Hollywood in pop culture, and McGwire was bigger than Brad Pitt. Steve, former calculated juicer of the NFL, ranked McGwire vintage '98 for epic stardom in sport, on par with Ruth, Jordan, Gretzky, Louis, spanning the century of celebrity athletes.
For historic talent in his time, McGwire combined natural athleticism, work ethic, mental preparation, and cutting-edge technology--especially drugs. Otherwise, Big Mac mania wouldn't have happened for the world. Steve couldn't have fathomed it.
So Steve was disappointed in the utter fall from grace for McGwire, who bottomed in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2005. A shrunken, cowering former athlete, Mac sniffed around steroid questions under oath, refusing to answer directly.
McGwire's disastrous appearance before Congress surprised Steve, who'd expected him to tell the truth, especially in light of the revelations from Jose Canseco's tell-all book Juiced and a New York Daily News expose that unleashed convincing allegations that Canseco and McGwire juiced together at Oakland in the early 1990s.
Canseco wrote of personally using steroids with McGwire on multiple occasions, and former FBI informants who had played roles in the FBI steroid sting Operation Equine of the early 1990s linked McGwire to a steroid dealer and training guru named Curtis Wenzlaff. The informants said Canseco and McGwire used steroids and protocols supplied by Wenzlaff, and one informant detailed a stacking recipe allegedly employed by the ballplayers.
The ballplayers weren't questioned--the FBI was going after suppliers, not users--but the new information silenced any question of McGwire's doping as far as Steve was concerned.
The night before McGwire testified, Steve played the role of advisor in an on-the-record interview with me, hypothetically recommending the proper approach for the cornered jock to take at Congress. Although McGwire didn't take Steve's advice to be open and honest, that advice remains useful for the disgraced hero, since McGwire, named the Cardinals hitting coach by manager Tony La Russa, will face questions and challenges by the time spring training opens in February, if not sooner.
"There's times in life where you've got to speak your piece," Steve told me on March 16, 2005. "And if I were McGwire, this is what I would say: 'Yeah, I doped, and I feel embarrassed by it. But I did it in part to enhance my own ability, my own training, and to make myself a better ballplayer. I also did in part to help the game of baseball be more entertaining.' If he would say that, I think the public could handle it."
"I think people would appreciate it if he came clean, finally," I said.
"And explained why he did it," Steve reiterated. "He could explain in terms that everybody could understand. Explain that he denied it for so long because he didn't want little kids following his route."
"But baseball's spiral of silence about doping," I noted. "McGwire's bound by the code--"
"No, he's not," Steve answered quickly. "He's retired... he's got no excuse. I'm sorry."
E-mail: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information on Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.
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